Album Review: The Car - Arctic Monkeys

On 29 January 2006, the British music industry changed forever, as Arctic Monkeys exploded onto the scene with their now legendary debut album ‘Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not’. Almost 17 years later, people who were born at the time of that release are now old enough to learn how to drive, leading us on to the band’s latest, aptly named album, ‘The Car’. If you were to line the two albums up alongside each other, you might not be able to tell that they are, in fact, written by the same person.

While some early Arctic Monkeys “fans” would lead you to believe that is a bad thing, it is much more a testament to the sustained genius of frontman Alex Turner. Turner directly addresses the backlash that the band was faced with off the back of Tranquillity Base in ‘Sculptures of Anything Goes’. He asserts that the band are going to ignore the insults of ‘horrible new sound’ and he’ll continue to ‘sing a tune’. Bands develop, and their sounds change. When you listen to Arctic Monkeys’ entire discography, you can clearly hear the development of their music from where it was in 2006.

‘The Car’ pushes Turner’s voice to the forefront and he experiments with falsetto in a way that he never has before. The album’s opener ‘There’d Better Be A Mirrorball’ (one of three songs released in anticipation of the October 21st release date along with ‘Body Paint’ and ‘I Aint Quite Where I Think I Am’,) immediately tells us that this album is going to be different to anything we’ve heard from Arctic Monkeys before, a point reinforced during ‘Mr Schwartz’ as we hear Alex Turner use fingerpicking technique on his guitar for the first time in any of their songs. Mirrorball also succeeds in pretty quickly killing off any lingering hope of a return to the intensity of the band’s early releases, with its ethereal ending serving as a stark reminder of the new Arctic Monkeys teased in ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino’.

The song on the album that calls back most to the band’s long-haired, baggy jeans days is ‘Body Paint’, due to the prominence of Jamie Cook’s guitar riffs and Matt Helders’ drums. Even that is coated in modernisation though, as the use of strings and Turner’s raspy falsetto, as well as the controlled tempo, ensure the song remains a far cry from songs like ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ and ‘Brianstorm’.

The album does seem to be more of an ‘Alex Turner Show’ than in previous releases, but then that’s the sort of luxury you can afford when you’re labelled “the voice of a generation” and “the greatest lyricist of the 21st Century”. Turner really shows off his song-writing acumen throughout ‘The Car’. Best encapsulating Turner’s lyrical ability is ‘I Aint Quite Where I Think I Am’, where he seems to directly question the fans who still long for the old Arctic Monkeys, asking them to give the new sound a chance through a metaphor of visiting the French Riviera.

At times, the album sounds more like something that would be released by ‘The Last Shadow Puppets’, Turner’s other project with Miles Kane; its use of strings particularly reminiscent of The Age of the Understatement. The band are consciously aware of this on ‘The Car’; on ‘Big Ideas’ Turner seems almost lamentable of the fact that ‘the orchestra’s got us all surrounded’, and he yearns for the ‘hysterical scenes’ of the mid-noughties. ‘Hello You’ exhibits this new element in the best way, with its reliance on strings evident in how, for much of the song, the strings make up a lot of the backing to Turner’s vocals, alongside a steady drum pattern.

In the eponymous song, ‘The Car’ Turner reflects on the necessity of Arctic Monkeys development, as they are ‘trying to adjust to what’s been there all along’. The holiday that is the band’s career cannot be completed until they ‘fetch something from the car’. In this case, the ‘something’ is ‘The Car’ itself. The sustained metaphor throughout the album of a car being repainted links to the idea of the band reinventing themselves, but ‘The Car’ itself remains present. The parts that make it up remain the same, despite the aesthetic differences. This is the crux of the entire album. Despite the change in sound, when they walk out at Ashton Gate on May 29th, Arctic Monkeys will still be the same band they were at that Reading gig in 2006.

In ‘Perfect Sense’, Turner seems to reminisce on the previous seventeen years. As the album comes to a close, he reveals that ‘I wrap my head around it all / And it makes perfect sense’, giving the album the sense of closure that it deserves. If Arctic Monkeys were still releasing the same chaotic, guitar-driven head-bangers that propelled them to international stardom, people would be bored. Seventeen years is a long time; The Beatles’ - who Turner himself cites as a big influence on his own musical career- didn’t even last 10 years at the top. ‘The Car’ was only beaten in the Charts by a record-breaking Taylor Swift album; and the band have a massive world tour scheduled for 2023. However, the Bond-esque track ‘Big Ideas’ may reveal something about the band’s future long term. This song is the most obviously auto biographical of their journey over the past decade and could be said to hint that this may be the end of the line. Turner reveals he can’t remember how these big ideas go. If this is the end for Arctic Monkeys, you have to at least admit, ‘it’s been a thrill.’

By James Woodward